For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hemingway spent fourteen months in Spain reporting the Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He saw the fighting at Guadalajara, at Brunete, at Teruel. He watched the Republic lose. For Whom the Bell Tolls is what that watching produced: a novel that compresses the entire war — its idealism, its betrayals, its political cynicism, its courage — into three days in the mountains of Segovia, May 1937.

Robert Jordan, an American dynamiter fighting for the Republic, has one mission: blow a bridge behind fascist lines at precisely the moment a larger offensive begins. The novel covers those three days in full, with a protagonist who knows the mission is probably a death sentence and chooses to proceed anyway. The title comes from John Donne: "No man is an island…any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind."

This is not the stripped-down Hemingway of the early stories. The prose has his compression, but the emotional range has expanded. There is the love story with María, which some readers resist and others find devastating. There is Pilar, one of the greatest characters Hemingway ever wrote. There is the political argument — Jordan is a communist, but the novel's view of the Communist Party's conduct in Spain is clearheaded and damning. There are the flashbacks to the massacre at Ronda, told by Pilar in a single extended monologue that is among the finest passages in American fiction.

Hemingway considered this the best novel he ever wrote. He was right.

Robert Jordan — an American professor from Montana who has come to Spain to fight fascism. He is competent, thoughtful, politically committed but not politically blind. His internal monologue across the three days constitutes the novel's consciousness: he knows the mission's odds, he loves María, he watches the partisans around him with clarity, he thinks about death with an honesty that earns its calm.

Pilar — the de facto leader of the partisan band, enormous in presence, a former camp follower who has known every variety of the Spanish Civil War's violence and idealism. Her extended account of the massacre at Ronda — how the Republican mob killed the town's fascists — is the moral center of the novel. She sees everything and lies about nothing.

María — a young woman rescued from fascist captivity; she and Jordan fall in love across the three days. Some readers find the romance too compressed to be believable; others understand that the compression is the point. Three days is all they have, and they know it.

Pablo — the partisan band's nominal leader, drunk on fear and disillusionment, a man who was brave once and has spent years watching that bravery dissolve. He is the novel's portrait of what war does to the people who survive it too long.

No. 1 · Pilar's account of the massacre at Ronda. The novel's longest set piece and its moral crux: Pilar describes how the Republicans killed the fascists in her town, the men beaten and thrown from the cliff, the crowd turning uglier than anyone intended. Hemingway gives this to Pilar — not to Jordan — because it needs the voice of someone who was there, who does not have the luxury of ideological distance. It is an account of atrocity committed by the side the novel is fighting for. A lesser novel would not have included it.

No. 2 · The earth moved. The love scenes between Jordan and María produced a famous phrase that has been mocked ever since. Read them in context: two people who know they have three days, in a sleeping bag in the mountains of Spain, trying to make a life's worth of love fit into seventy-two hours. The phrase is not purple prose. It is the feeling of two people attempting something impossible and succeeding for a moment.

No. 3 · The final pages. Jordan, wounded, has sent the others ahead. He is lying on pine needles waiting for the fascist cavalry to come up the trail. He tries not to think about what is coming. He thinks about it. He holds on. The novel ends not with his death but with him holding on. The last line — his hands pressing the ground — is the most precise rendering of the decision to endure rather than escape that American fiction has produced.

Read this if you are…

• Any reader who has filed Hemingway under "macho minimalism" and stopped at The Sun Also Rises. This novel proves the early stylistic limitation was a choice, not a ceiling.
• Readers interested in political fiction that does not require ideological purity — a novel that fights for a cause while looking at that cause honestly.
• Anyone who wants to understand the Spanish Civil War from the inside of a particular three days.

Skip it if you are…

• Looking for action in the conventional sense. The bridge is not blown until the last fifty pages. The novel is almost entirely interior.
• Bothered by the pseudo-archaic dialogue ("Thou" for Spanish tú). Hemingway's attempt to render the formality of Spanish through archaic English is a real stylistic choice that some readers never accept.

Read in long sessions. The novel's power is cumulative: the three-day timeframe only creates pressure if you feel time moving. Read Pilar's massacre account at one sitting — it is about fifteen pages and needs continuity. When you reach the final chapter, slow down. Jordan's monologue at the end is managing time very carefully; let it.

The pseudo-archaic dialogue ("I obscenity in the milk of thy cowardice") was Hemingway's solution to the Spanish profanity problem — he wanted to suggest the specific weight of Spanish swearing without rendering it in English equivalents. Accept the convention and it works.

• George Orwell — Homage to Catalonia (1938). Orwell's memoir of fighting in Spain for the POUM militia: the same war, the same political disillusionment, reported from the inside. The companion nonfiction to the novel.
• John Dos Passos — Adventures of a Young Man (1939). Dos Passos broke with Hemingway over Spain; this novel is his account of a young American's disillusionment with the Communist Party's conduct during the war. The political disagreement in real time.
• Martha Gellhorn — The Face of War (1959). Hemingway's third wife covered the Spanish Civil War alongside him. Her dispatches from Spain are the journalistic record of what his novel fictionalizes.

1. Hemingway includes Pilar's account of the Republican massacre at Ronda. Why? What is lost if you remove it from the novel?
2. Jordan is a committed communist who has serious doubts about how the Communist Party is running the war. How does the novel hold both positions simultaneously?
3. The love story is compressed into three days. Does the compression make it more or less believable? What does the novel claim for love that can only be completed in seventy-two hours?
4. Pilar tells the future by smell. What is she smelling? What does the novel suggest about her power?
5. Pablo is a coward at the end — and then, at the last moment, he comes back. How do you account for that return? What has changed?
6. The novel ends before Jordan dies. What is the effect of ending on his holding on rather than on his death?